Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been all about mobile since the start of 2013. The company has recently launched its Facebook Home software, bringing a full Facebook experience to Android phones, and the firm has worked out several new ways to monetize the mobile experience. Today the company has gone one step further, redesigning Pages from Mobile up.
The Pages service offered by Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) allows businesses to list their details on the social network in order to drive customers their way. The company unveiled a new design for the service today, hitting out at the current biggest player in the market, Yelp Inc (NYSE:YELP).
The new design, which in a first for the Menlo Park company has been designed for mobile first, allows users to rate businesses and increases the visibility of details about the featured company on the page. Pages can now show users a map of the business’ location, and other information like contact details, and reviews are more available to users.
Yelp Inc (NYSE:YELP) has been the leader in social networking for business for years, but Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is in an ideal position to take that traffic, and that revenue, from the company. The new Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB) redesign might just be a good step in that direction.
When Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) first began to excel at personal social networking, many analysts predicted that the company would expand to take the place of many of the more specialized social networks like Yelp Inc (NYSE:YELP). That hasn’t happened just yet, but it is still part of the remit Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) feels from its investors, and the company is clearly continuing down that path.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been getting good reviews so far from its redesign of the Pages interfaces. Over at Tech Crunch, Josh Constine commented on the new designs accessibility, observing that “By making the Like, Check-in, and Recommend buttons more prominent, Facebook is sure to inspire more of those actions.”
That’s exactly the kind of response that Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) wants, but not from tech writers. Facebook wants to change the way that its users interact with businesses through the social network. If it can make the experience better than the one offered by Yelp Inc (NASDAQ:YELP), it has a good chance of taking that company’s business, and increasing its mobile revenue at the same time.
